BLM signs snatchedhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/173/5601
San Juan County, Utah, officials are removing "road
closed" signs from BLM land in the Grand Gulch area, claiming
ownership of the roads.UTAH

San Juan County officials recently removed
federal "road closed" signs on three dirt roads they claim in the
Grand Gulch area of southeastern Utah. The action could provoke a
lawsuit to test who owns these roads - San Juan County or the
Bureau of Land Management (HCN, 10/28/96: Utah counties bulldoze
the BLM, Park Service).

San Juan County officials
say an 1866 federal law gives them control over hundreds of miles
of dirt roads that run through BLM-controlled land. Federal
officials dispute many of these claims, arguing some of these
routes are not even roads.

The outcome could have
major consequences for Utah's long-running wilderness debate.
County officials argue that many of the wilderness areas proposed
by BLM and environmental groups are ineligible for wilderness
designation because they are crisscrossed by county-owned roads. If
the counties prevail, Utah would have much less land eligible for
wilderness.

A recent check of BLM records
revealed that the agency had not completed the formal process
needed to close roads in San Juan County. The BLM now is beginning
that process, which is expected to take a few months. Then the
"closed" signs on those roads will be replaced. Instead of taking
legal action against the county, BLM's Kent Walter said his agency
simply will replace the "road closed" sign on a route into Collins
Canyon.

]]>No publisherGrowth & SustainabilityArticleNobody gives a damn about this damhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/129/4120
The Army abandons Red Butte Reservoir in Utah, and leaves
no one responsible for the dam, its reservoir and the June sucker
fish that live in the water.

Red Butte Reservoir is one of several
refuges established in northern Utah to protect the June sucker - a
fish native to Utah Lake, south of the Great Salt Lake. Some 400
suckers placed in the reservoir in 1994 are thriving, says Reed
Harris, director of the Utah field office of the Utah Fish and
Wildlife Service.

But no one knows who is
responsible for the reservoir. The land it sits on was transferred
from the Army to the Forest Service in 1970, but the Army agreed to
continue to manage the water - until it changed its mind in
March.

Attorneys for the Forest Service say the
Army cannot legally give up responsibility for the aging dam, which
would cost about $2 million to bring up to modern safety standards
or about $5 million to remove. Salt Lake County and the city of
Salt Lake have considered taking responsibility for the reservoir,
but both say the repair costs are too high.

The
Fish and Wildlife Service could remove the fish from the reservoir,
but would prefer them to remain in place. Says Harris, "This is one
of the rare instances where I don't want to see them tear a dam
out."

* Jim
Woolf

]]>No publisherWaterArticleNo takers for wilderness triphttps://www.hcn.org/issues/103/3227
Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt tries to calm the state's bitter
wilderness debate with a camping trip in proposed wilderness area -
but no one wants to come.

Leavitt invited environmental leaders,
county commissioners, federal land managers, ranchers and coal
miners to eastern Utah. They would visit proposed wilderness areas
on Bureau of Land Management land and talk about how to keep some
of the land roadless and wild.

But wilderness
advocates said they won't be roasting marshmallows with the
governor anytime soon. "We have a cordial but fundamental
disagreement with the process," says Ted Wilson, a former Salt Lake
City mayor who serves on the board of the Southern Utah Wilderness
Alliance.

Wilson says SUWA and the Utah
Wilderness Coalition's other 147 members want a single, statewide
wilderness bill that deals with all 5.7 million acres in their
proposal, including 1.3 million acres within the new Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

But
wilderness supporters aren't Leavitt's only worry. County
commissioners and members of Utah's congressional delegation,
unsure that the camping trip idea will work, have not yet given it
their full support. Still, Leavitt remains optimistic. Wilderness
designation "is not an uncomplicated problem," he says. "It is one
I am continuing to work on."

*Jim
Woolf

]]>No publisherWildlifeArticleWill counties de(grade) wilderness?https://www.hcn.org/issues/90/2783
Bruce Babbitt's announcement of a new BLM inventory of
southern Utah wilderness leads to a flurry of illegal road work,
since roaded land can't be classified as wilderness.

Environmentalists believe
Babbitt's recent announcement of a new BLM inventory of wilderness
led to a flurry of illegal road work by county crews. For if roads
exist, the Bureau of Land Management can't include those lands as
potential wilderness. "This is malicious and mean-spirited and damn
illegal and should stop," says Ken Rait of the Southern Utah
Wilderness Alliance.

Babbitt ordered the
reinventory this summer after Rep. James Hansen, R-Utah, challenged
the secretary to find 5 million acres of BLM land in Utah that
qualify as wilderness (HCN, 9/2/96). An earlier BLM inventory found
3.2 million acres.

Rait says he will be
patrolling BLM lands looking for freshly graded roads that once
were two-track routes or long-abandoned mining roads. Kate
Kitchell, Moab district manager for the BLM, has also asked her
staff to pay special attention to road work in Grand and San Juan
counties.

When asked about the road-grading, San
Juan County Commissioner Ty Lewis offered no details, other than
saying, "Let's put it this way: They (the BLM crews) will be able
to identify our roads." Kane County Commissioner Norm Carroll also
conceded that the wilderness reinventory is "in the back of our
minds."

*Jim
Woolf

]]>No publisherWildlifeArticleHow the West was won, and won, and ...https://www.hcn.org/issues/45/1385
A look at history shows a cycle in the rise and fall of
Western wise-use movements and sagebrush rebellions.When did the following take place?

A conservative wave sweeps the nation, and Republicans take control of the government. Western ranchers, furious about a proposed increase in the grazing fee on public lands, complain about the bloated federal bureaucracy.

Members of Congress from the 12 Western states decide they have had enough of Eastern domination and introduce bills calling for millions of acres of public lands to be transferred to the states.

A correct answer, of course, is 1994-95.

But the same scenario played out in 1929-30. And again in 1945-47. With a few minor changes, it also describes 1979-80.

"It's a cycle," explains Bill Robbins, a Western historian and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University in Corvallis. "It usually reaches its peak or zenith in more conservative national moods."

Utah Rep. Jim Hansen and Wyoming Sen. Craig Thomas are leaders of the latest uprising. Following an unsuccessful proposal by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to hike grazing fees, the two Republicans introduced companion bills in Congress calling for the Bureau of Land Management to offer nearly 270 million acres of public lands and all its minerals to the states.

Brant Calkin, former director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, says giving BLM lands to the states would be the first step in transferring the public's resources into private hands.

"The American public would be the losers," he says.

Exactly the same arguments on both sides have been made for decades:

Colorado Attorney General Robert E. Winbourne argued for a land transfer, saying the people in his state "favor the adoption of any program that will tend to limit or curtail the system of bureaucracy that has grown in Washington."

That led Bernard DeVoto, one of the loudest critics of the idea during the 1945-1947 cycle, to describe it as "the biggest land grab in American history."

James Muhn, a land-law historian for the BLM in Denver who has studied these cycles, says the Hansen-Thomas bill is doomed to failure if the old axiom is true about history repeating itself.

But, Muhn said, the outpouring of anger that prompted all previous land-transfer proposals has forced federal land managers to make concessions to the ranchers.

This pattern is so well established that R. McGreggor Cawley, an associate professor of political science at the University of Wyoming, doubts whether ranchers and other public-land users are even serious about transferring public lands to the states.

He contends these uprisings are mostly demonstrations of the West's political muscle designed to keep federal land managers in line.

Muhn contends that Americans have argued about their public lands since 1780, when the original 13 colonies entered into their first confederation. One of the most hotly debated questions was how to handle the frontier between the Appalachian Mountains and Mississippi River, where several states claimed territory.

The land eventually was ceded to the federal government "to be disposed of for the common benefit of the United States."

Federal control of that land was challenged in the 1820s and 1830s when states in the Midwest began entering the union. They wanted control over all public lands within their boundaries. Congress insisted that the federal government retain control.

The first serious attempt to turn these lands over to the states started in the 1920s, when Sen. R.M. Stanfield, R-Ore., became concerned about attempts to raise grazing fees on U.S. Forest Service lands.

Stanfield held hearings throughout the West at which ranchers were invited to air their grievances against the federal government. These meetings spawned a proposal for the states to take over the public lands.

President Herbert Hoover, a strong states' rights advocate, backed the idea in a letter sent to a Western governors' meeting in Salt Lake City on Aug. 27, 1929. He offered to turn over to the states all of the federal government's desert lands, but none of the minerals beneath them.

"It may be stated at once that our Western states have long since passed from their swaddling clothes and are today more competent to manage much of these affairs than is the federal government. Moreover, we must seek every opportunity to retard the expansion of federal bureaucracy and to place our communities in control of their own destinies," he wrote the governors.

After three years of study, the governors rejected the offer. They saw no reason to take the barren desert lands if they weren't accompanied by the valuable mineral resources.

Utah Gov. George H. Dern in 1932 summed up his position this way: "The states already own, in their school-land grants, millions of acres of this same kind of land, which they can neither sell nor lease, and which is yielding no income. Why should they want more of this precious heritage of desert?"

Although the land wasn't transferred, the controversy prompted the Forest Service to impose a much smaller grazing-fee increase than originally proposed.

The issue arose again in the early 1940s when the Grazing Service (a predecessor of the BLM) decided its newly authorized grazing fee wasn't high enough. The Grazing Service wanted to triple it.

An enraged Sen. Pat McCarran, D-Nev., followed the example of Stanfield and encouraged ranchers to vent their anger in a series of public hearings around the West.

The hearings led to a 1946 bill by Sen. Edward V. Robertson, R-Wyo., to turn over virtually all federal lands to the state. The bill went nowhere, but it was followed by legislative maneuvering that not only blocked the proposed grazing-fee increase but slashed the operating budget of the Grazing Service.

The next serious proposal arose during the "Sagebrush Rebellion" of the late 1970s, when Westerners again demanded autonomy. It wasn't grazing fees that prompted this rebellion, but rising environmental and management regulations.

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, R, championed the rebels' cause, introducing a bill in 1979 that would have transferred the surface of BLM lands to the states.

The Hatch bill died quietly after the election of President Ronald Reagan and his appointment of James Watt as Interior secretary.

Will this issue ever be resolved?

Political scientist Cawley says there is no chance of resolution until Americans come to agreement on what they want from their public lands.

Public lands in the late 1700s were a source of revenue to pay off the Revolutionary War debt, he says. As the nation began its Western expansion, public lands became the source of new farms, ranches and cities. When the homesteading period ended, public lands became a source of raw materials for a rapidly industrializing society.

Attitudes are changing again, with growing numbers calling for the preservation of public lands for their recreational or ecological values. It's a trend familiar to anyone who has followed the recent wilderness debate in Utah, where environmentalists want 5.7 million acres of wilderness and county officials are willing to settle for no more than a million acres. (See story page 10.)

Cawley says he sees no early resolution - just gridlock.

The writer works for the Salt Lake Tribune.]]>No publisherArchive1995/10/16 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleFeds targeted by louder thunder from belowhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/27/765
More than 500 attend conservative Western summit in
January.SALT LAKE CITY, Utah - Met Johnson worried that no one would show up for the two-day Western Summit of conservative state legislators, county commissioners and public-land users he organized here in January.

Johnson, the leader of the so-called "Cowboy Caucus" in the Utah House of Representatives, feared the "steam might have gone out of the movement" to wrest control of the West from the federal government.

It was just the opposite. The recent election results spurred more than 500 people to crowd into a downtown hotel to listen to pep talks from sympathetic members of Congress and organize strategies to defeat grazing reform, protect state control of water rights, and preserve road rights-of-way across public land.

"There's a great difference in attitude," said Jack Barraclough, a Republican member of the Idaho House of Representatives, noting that changes in federal policy being discussed at the meeting are "things that people thought impossible only a few months ago."

"There's new hope that we can make a difference," said Tom Hatch, a commissioner from Utah's Garfield County.

Rep. James V. Hansen, R-Utah, received thunderous applause when he told the group: "I honestly feel that one of the most prudent things we could do is to pass legislation that turns (over) the BLM lands to the states ... I can testify, and I believe with all my heart, that the legislative bodies of the West absolutely can take as good care of the ground as the federal government and do it cheaper and better."

Ray Baum, leader of the Republican majority in the Oregon House of Representatives, said states want more than just control of the land. They want the right to set their own policies for environmental protection, endangered species, welfare, and health care.

"In 1865 we fought a war against too much states' rights. But the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Now we're in the middle of a quiet revolution in which the states are taking back their role from the feds."

He argued, for example, that Oregon laws protecting endangered species and regulating the timber industry should prevail on federal lands, not laws passed by Congress.

"We (the state) can protect the salmon and spotted owl, and still have timber production. The federal government just doesn't get it," said Baum.

Aubyn A. Curtiss, a Republican member of the Montana House of Representatives, said Western legislators are beginning to work together to create a "unified approach" on the state-sovereignty issue.

"We live there. Our local economies are important to us. We should have more participation in the federal decision-making process," she said.

Some 50 protesters from the Sierra Club held a brief demonstration outside the hotel during the meeting's second day. But just as the camera crews from local television stations were setting up to shoot the event, about 60 people from the summit raced out of the building carrying their own signs and held a counter-demonstration on the sidewalk.

Lawson LeGate, Southwest regional representative for the Sierra Club, led his side in chants like: "Public lands in public hands," and "Wise use or wise abuse."

Charles S. Cushman, executive director of the American Land Rights Association, responded from his group with such chants as: "What do we hate? Babbitt! What do we love? Jobs!" and "What do we want? Mining! When do we want it? Now!"

Back inside, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, warned that the "euphoria" of the recent election needs to be balanced by the "cold hard fact" that eight of the 53 the Republicans in the U.S. Senate are "very liberal." This could make it hard to pass many of the reforms sought by Western conservatives, he said.

The Salt Lake City meeting was the third Western Summit. Previous sessions were held in Phoenix and Denver.

The writer works for the Salt Lake Tribune.

]]>No publisherPolitics1995/01/23 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleFarmers spin federal dollars into hayhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/24/689
Utah farmers receive money for water
conservation.When Utah environmentalists began complaining about new water-conservation proposals during a recent public hearing, farmer Howard Riley leaned toward the man next to him and muttered: "It depends on how you define conservation."

Riley, a director of the Central Utah Water Conservancy District, represents farmers in Juab County and southern Utah County who would receive most of the $850,000 Congress is expected to appropriate this year for water conservation in northern Utah.

Under a recommendation to the conservancy district board, which administers the new program, farmers would receive about $582,000 in federal funds to replace flood irrigation systems with sprinklers and other devices that use less water. The farmers would contribute about $290,000.

All the saved water would be kept by the farmers to supplement their scarce late-season supplies. The extra water would boost profits by about $100 an acre.

While these projects meet the legal requirements for water conservation, they worry environmentalists and wildlife groups, which had hoped some saved water would be left in rivers to benefit fish and sustain wetlands.

"An extra crop of alfalfa - I don't call that saving water. I call that increasing production," said Carol Withrow, vice president of the Great Salt Lake chapter of the Audubon Society.

Darrell H. Mensel of Midway, a board member of Trout Unlimited, added: "If Congress is providing the money for these conservation projects, they should be able to require that at least a portion of this money protects in-stream flows."

Farmers have a different view.

"If a farmer can save water and hang onto it, it still belongs to him," said Vic Saunders, spokesman for the Utah Farm Bureau.

"I don't know why they (the environmentalists) are concerned," he added. "They got $15 million from the Central Utah Project Completion Act to keep water in the streams, protect wildlife and mitigate damage caused by the water project."

When Congress authorized $922 million for completion of the Central Utah Project in 1992, it provided money to repair environmental damage caused by the massive project and it required local officials to begin work on an aggressive water-conservation program.

Of the total appropriated, $15 million went directly to the Central Utah Mitigation group, to be used for environmental purposes. But Congress also offered up to $50 million over the next several years to help fund water-conservation projects. The expectation was that conservation would both increase the amount of irrigation water farmers had, thus delaying the need for big, damaging projects, and return some water to natural systems. So far, only the first goal is being achieved.

Applications for 30 projects totaling $56 million already have been submitted to the water district, but only seven were ready for action this year.

A committee ranked the projects, recommending funding for five, including three farm projects, a golf course project that would use irrigation water from a canal instead of drinking water, and the recycling of cooling tower water for a Salt Lake City business, Terra Diamond.

The Central Utah Water Conservancy District board recently accepted most of the committee's recommendations, but the public may see more benefits next year. Jeffrey W. Appel, an attorney who represents several wildlife groups, said the debate has prompted the water district to reconsider the definitions of terms such as "public interest" and "environmentally acceptable."

"The redefinitions would enhance the attractiveness of proposals that include an in-stream flow. That would move the program closer to the spirit and intent of the water-conservation provisions of the law," he said.